ROBERT STEELE: Big Data is now officially a 24/7 circus with an extra ration of clowns. No one has properly defined Big Data (what it is now, what it should aspire to be) — purchases are being made on the margins, and we speculate that as with HP and Autonomy, the buyers do not really have a grasp of what they are buying — or not buying. MarkLogic, Lucid Imagination, and a dozen others are all still out there. One obvious core value within any purchase is the staff and its expertise — but we would be quick to point out that none of the big data experts we know are intelligence (decision-support) experts, and most of them have no clear grasp of comprehensive design and open source everything / open source engineering.